In Sasha Gordon’s Temporary (2019), golden-haired blow-up dolls in Girl Scout uniforms hijack a suburban neighborhood. One tugs helplessly at a wagon on which the artist, dressed in a decorated green vest, is perched eating Thin Mints, indifferent to the chaos.
The scene, a farce buckling into a nightmare, tackles personal trauma and mental illness. Painted while Gordon was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, it marked a shift in her practice: Until that point, her works had increasingly focused on her identity but “they were still paintings that were more illustrative, from memory,” Gordon said. “And then after that Girl Scout painting, I started to get a bit weirder with concept and subject matter.”